


Decade of Hell

by fog_shadow



Category: Sapphire and Steel, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Case Fic, Crossover, Episode Related, Gen, POV Outsider, depending on which canon you're coming from, sundry other cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-04-30 13:18:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5165216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fog_shadow/pseuds/fog_shadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>When I tell you that Time has moods, a disposition to be intuited, I'm not speaking metaphorically. Anger is one of its moods—anger and the desire for retribution, vengeance. Time itself has tried to punish me for my arrogance. It has kept me from my wife, denied me my future.</i><br/>—Captain Annorax, "Year of Hell: Part 2"</p><p>Or, Silver gets stuck on one hell of an assignment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decade of Hell

  
Year 1

_We should dismantle this weapon and rejoin our people._

  


If not for the briefing, Silver would have wondered how it had taken Them so long to catch on to the Time break. Even so, he still cannot altogether grasp why the interference has persisted as it does—surely 190 years of ongoing activity holds a record under some set of criteria for Longest Unresolved Disturbance. What information They have given Silver instructs him to focus on the spaceship itself—a vessel which simultaneously powers and protects itself from a weapon capable of erasing its target from Time altogether—and that some number of Silver's colleagues have preceded him in endeavouring to combat the disruption to Time. The briefing had not elaborated, but Silver can guess that those Elements now number among _ex_ -colleagues.

Silver arrives on the time-ship to find that the crew takes no particular note of him, apparently either accepting him as one of their own or overlooking him entirely. It makes him feel uneasy, though he can't put his finger on why: standard operating procedure calls for Elements to blend in to the setting of their assignments. If anything, the uneasiness itself makes him feel more uneasy; Silver doesn't tend to have repressive instincts—"Far _too_ irrepressible," according to . . . someone.

Within a matter of minutes, Silver, in efficient discourse with the machinery itself, has learned the layout of the whole ship. Just as he begins to turn his investigations to the vessel's mechanisms of operation, a voice over the intercom system commands the entire crew to "prepare for temporal incursion." Silver decides he needs to witness this more closely and makes his way to the bridge.

His orders, if not explicit, do at least imply that he should refrain from engaging with the crew as a direct means to complete his assignment, and the briefing had included very little information on them. This suits Silver well enough, as he inclines more towards machines than people in any case, but now, waiting for the bridge crew to finish their last calculations, he takes the opportunity to glean what he can of them. None of the crew looks 200, at least based on Silver's experience with this species, though he cannot verify that assessment nearly as well as some of his colleagues could. Despite their apparent physiological ages, however, he can see 190 years of determination in them. These people have tried for longer than their natural lifespans to restore the glory of their empire.

All preparations complete, the captain gives the order to erase a single deep space probe from history. The weapon fires and the probe has never existed—no engineers ever constructed it, no world just beginning to reach beyond itself ever launched the probe on a centuries-long journey. From what Silver grasps of the causality chain, one culture's space exploration program developed in some other direction, multiple first contacts between alien worlds now occurred under very different circumstances, and the entire balance of power in the region has shifted significantly to favour the crew of the time-ship.

"Initial readings suggest that we have achieved a sixty-four percent restoration of the Krenim Imperium," one officer reports.

"Target event status?" the captain demands.

"Negative, sir," the officer says.

"No unexpected diseases," a second adds. "And no other counter indications yet."

"Very well. When the assessment is complete, we will begin calculating the next incursion." Silver watches the captain leave the bridge, astonished by the cavalier disregard for Time. His best course for repairing this mess surely does lie with the mechanics of the ship and not with its crew. Most cultures, in his experience, who have developed the concept of altering Time, even if they haven't mastered the ability to do so, equally possess the idea that such alterations must only occur under the most carefully considered circumstances, if indeed at all. Reality, admittedly, seldom matches up to ideal, but the time-ship captain seems to act so far beyond the usual realms of either that Silver tries to imagine how he might respond to one of Silver's colleagues who likes to describe the nature of Time. "Time is like an equation," such an Element might say. "Any tampering to one side of the equation renders it false, and Time will take advantage of the imbalance to achieve whatever gain it can." A crude explanation, but such approximations can never aspire to anything else. Silver doesn't know how the captain would reply, but he does know that the weapon cannot continue to exist, and he turns his attention to disabling it.

* * *

Six months of tinkering with circuits and power relays, Silver thinks, and he really ought to manage disabling a device beyond Krenim repair. However, they do have nearly two centuries of familiarity with their ship, and for all Silver's innate expertise at getting machines to work for him, it becomes clear that he and the Krenim crew match one another evenly in command over the vessel. Silver has managed to delay the temporal incursions, but unless he works continuously against the repair crews, he cannot keep the temporal core permanently offline.

He will admit that his strategy has contained a certain flaw: Silver has limited his sabotage attempts to damage that he could repair himself. While some Elements opt to resolve desperate situations by making things go _boom_ in a big way, Silver would prefer not to rid himself entirely of a tool that might prove useful if he still has to repair the damage that these people have created even after he renders the ship itself non-functional. He begins to concede, though, that the _boom_ method might have its place after all. If Potassium had heard him admit as much, she'd have slapped him on the back and said, "Now you're coming around, lad!" Steel, on the other hand—

Silver stops dead, startled by the thought. He doesn't know anyone named Steel, and certainly not a fellow Element. He knows all sixty-one of them (most in more ways than one), and they don't have a Steel amongst the lot of them. Which makes perfect sense: Elements bear the names of _elements_ , after all, and while they have a lot of gaps when compared to the periodic table, an _alloy_ would never have a place among them. For all that, though, Silver can't shake the feeling that Steel would respond to his tentative endorsement of explosive solutions with a severe glare made up of condescension and surprise that, given Steel's range of emotions, somehow conveys fondness to those who know him well.

An absurd fancy, from start to finish: no one knows Steel well because Steel doesn't exist.

But: explosions. If he destroys the ship in the right way, it disappears from existence and has never once fired its weapon to alter Time. The captain disappears from existence and has never begun his two-century long quest to rebuild with destruction. Silver might disappear from existence, unless the instant reduplication kicks in, though under the circumstances he probably wouldn't wager much on the expectation . . . not that he ever really understood the point of gambling. He remembers one of his colleagues telling him that the fun comes from losing more often than winning, and that this had almost made sense at the time. He can picture her very clearly in his memory, all in blue, and he knows that she had another impossible name. He tries to break it down into its components—Aluminium, Oxygen, Titanium, Iron—but none of them fit.

If Silver does wipe himself from existence, at least he'll wipe these contradictory memories as well.

* * *

  
Year 2

_Past, present, and future. They exist as one; they breathe together._

  


Regrettably, the Krenim have built their damnable machine much too well. If he spends three years at it, he thinks, maybe he'll find the right routes to build up a power overload when the ship does not have its built-in protection running. If he had enough innate ability for explosions, he could nudge it along himself. He thinks of Potassium again, but when he tries to contact her, he gets nothing at all. Not the telepathic busy signal that says, _I'm doing something very important, now go away unless you want a ringing in your brain that will make that incident with the bell tower sound like the smallest pin dropping_ ; not a faint thrum of someone too far away to understand, just . . . nothing. Potentially alarming, but not necessarily a cause for panic just yet: Silver has gotten spun off into alternate timelines on assignments—in fact, to consider matters rationally, that's already happened half a dozen times on this assignment alone—and maybe Potassium (Potassium of this timeline) has temporarily wandered down a similar rabbit hole.

Silver hesitates before he tries to contact other Elements from this timeline. His uneasiness wins out, though (and in any case, They don't have really strict prohibitions against it), and he manages to get Mercury, but when Silver asks about Potassium, Mercury just asks, _Who?_ and Silver decides to drop the conversation. He gives himself a moment, then tries the rest of the Elements—just gentle pings to see if he can find them. He only finds fifty-nine: Silicon has become a blank silence as well.

They lose Elements from time to time, of course; it does happen. But two in a year doesn't happen ( _unless a partnership goes down_ . . . but that makes no sense, because they don't work in partnerships, except in the gravest emergencies), and neither does forgetting they ever existed. At least, forgetting doesn't _always_ happen. Silver can name Elements they've lost over the years: Plutonium and Gold and Radium. Losing even the memory comes a little too close for comfort to what the time-ship does—erasing things and people and places from existence. He wonders if that happened to his imaginary Sapphire and Steel, though if it did, he doesn't understand how he still has partial memories of them. The thought unsettles him a little too much, and in any case they still don't have proper Element names. Silver likes his other theory better.

According to Silver's other theory, he has subconsciously manufactured a pair of entities that symbolize or condense out parts of himself. Steel represents Silver's commitment to resolving an assignment thoroughly and effectively, and his ability to think his way through problems . . . though Steel works more on a broad strategic level rather than Silver's much closer tactical focus. Sapphire, meanwhile, manifests his preference for tidying things up neatly and elegantly, and something of his desire to know how things work; she doesn't do machines, but she has the entirety of present knowledge at her disposal. And they both can do things Silver _really wishes he could do right now_. Clearly figments of his imagination. Steel could probably make the ship explode.

Silver knows this ship and its workings inside and out, and how the weapon operates. He could build a scaled-down version, he thinks—just a little hand weapon—and erase the captain. The captain drives this ship of insanity: his obliteration ought to suffice to prevent the whole party from ever having started.

* * *

Someday, Silver will figure out what really powers the time-ship and solve every energy crisis in the universe. If he connects his miniaturization directly into the temporal core, he can get enough power for it to just think about starting up and then fizzle out immediately. He has checked the entire system a dozen times and has built his reproduction exact in every detail; nowhere can he find any point or path that would make the power more efficient on a larger scale.

Back to the original, then. Maybe he can make it backfire on them.

* * *

  
Year 3

_Time is patient, so we must be patient with it._

  


Or maybe he can't. For (no surprise) mostly the same reasons he can't directly blow up the ship, plus a few new ones for good measure. Five more Elements have gone silent, and Silver has decided his instructions don't count for anything anymore.

Much though it pains him to admit—and Silver can't recall that he has had to do so ever before—certain mechanisms of the time-ship elude him. Silver has never known such humiliation: he ought to have worked out the machine's operation by breakfast, have taken it apart by lunch, put it back together with modifications of his own design by supper, polished all the filigree by bedtime, and done the whole business all over again in his sleep just for show. Yet here he stands, over 800 each of breakfasts, lunches, suppers and sleeps into this job—not that he needs any of those in anything near that frequency—and he might as well have just received his assignment.

Silver has decided (in his defense) that the answer does not actually lie in the machinery. His imaginary Sapphire, he thinks, would have gone straight to investigating the captain; he probably can't do exactly what she does as well as she does, but he agrees with her idea and figures he can't possibly do much worse at her work than at his own. After all, his imagination has extrapolated her job from his.

* * *

  
Year 5

_I'm altering history on a massive scale. The destinies of countless star systems are in my hands._

  


The captain of the time-ship has an obsession so enormous it could probably destroy a metaphysical region larger than Silver can even comprehend. It works like this:

  * The ship's power source? Time, apparently. Not just built up tension from messing around with the timeline, but actual Time itself.
  * The captain's goal? Restore the Krenim colony on Kyana Prime, and with it his wife and family.
  * The catch? Despite over a thousand attempts spanning 194.3 years, the Kyana Prime colony won't come back. For all that the captain designed the ship himself, Time has the final say in how it works.



From what Silver can tell—and he finds this extremely frustrating—the captain very nearly understands this. Silver has the entire communications system of the ship at his fingertips, which (among other amenities) gives him access to the immense archive of data and crew notes compiled over the ship's entire history, and, with a little persuasion, even consents to let Silver into the personal logs as well. Choice selections from the captain include:

  * Year 14: the first unqualified personification of Time in the captain's personal logs: . . . _Despite the recent string of disappointments, I believe I am at last convincing Time around to my side . . . . I expect us to complete our task with just three further incursions._
  * Year 36: creation of the category _Qualitative Observations of Time_ in the captain's private notes, which contains not only his own records, but selections from the crew's reports as well
  * Year 40: creation of the file "Inferences on Time's Moods" in the captain's private notes
  * Year 113: first publication of "Discerning and Accommodating the Disposition of Time" to a public directory
  * Year 116: "Discerning and Accommodating the Disposition of Time" cited as required reading for the crew
  * Year 122: first remark in the captain's personal logs of Time actively interfering with the restoration of Kyana Prime: _. . . Based on these retrospective calculations, there are clearly two occasions when Kyana Prime ought to have come back to us. I can only conclude that Time has chosen to hold this one thing for some purpose of its own. The most obvious explanation is anger—that Time, resentful of my incursions, now witholds my desire from me._



The idea of Time deliberately preventing the restoration of the Kyana Prime colony becomes a common theme over the next decades, but every time the captain raises it, he ties it back into an idea of revenge, convinced that Time wishes to punish him for his arrogance—usually identified as either presuming to dictate the fates of worlds, or as usurping rights and powers from Time. The fool somehow fails to see—despite acknowledging his extreme arrogance—that the very assumption of vengeance directed at himself burdens him with far greater significance than he truly possesses. This man, who has the cleverness to turn Time itself into a power source and the patience to spend weeks or even months calculating the effects of a possible temporal incursion, still plays no greater role than a mere tool to Time. Quite simply, to Silver's eye, Time keeps Kyana Prime out of the captain's grasp so he will continue his temporal incursions, each instance allowing Time to gain another foothold towards its own goal.

Silver finds this blatantly obvious now that he has started to look at the actually relevant evidence, but apparently not even two hundred years suffice for the captain of the time-ship to understand his real problem. Perhaps Silver should feel grateful that the captain operates under ignorance (or pride) too overbearing to attempt to bargain with Time or to court it.

Despite all this, Silver still hasn't moved far from his original starting place. He understands more of the problem than he formerly had, but has no further insight into how to solve it. Obviously, everything revolves around the captain—which Silver's known for years—and neutralizing him ought to remove most, if not all, motivation for the time-ship and its crew to continue their antics. Perhaps Silver can find some significantly disaffected crew members to work that angle for him.

Silver pings through his fellow Elements again, and finds only forty-four. He has considered, fleetingly, advising his remaining colleagues join him on the time-ship, but he always dismisses the idea. They all have important assignments elsewhere, and if everyone just sat around with Silver waiting for someone to come up with a solution, hundreds of other breaks would go unresolved, and Time might just unravel that much faster.

* * *

  
Year 9

_This vessel is more than a weapon; it's a museum of lost histories._

  


Most of the crew fulfil their duties through habit, invested in them out of custom. Silver has found a handful who might have interest in a mutiny, if given adequate stimulus. Unfortunately, motivation for upsetting a long-established order doesn't show itself in much evidence on the time-ship; evidently, drastically lengthened lifespans have produced more complacency in on-going routine than burning desire to upset a familiar order, however flawed. Nonetheless, Silver tries, in his blending-into-the-background-circuitry sort of way, to encourage their discontent. He can't tell whether this actually accomplishes anything.

Silver's own ninth year crosses the halfway mark to its completion when the time-ship and its crew have spent 198.8 years in pursuit of their ends. He worries about the ship reaching its two hundredth year, though admittedly two centuries according to Krenim reckoning has no reason to hold more significance to Time than any other span in the universe. The crew, however, may find it significant: some, the captain included, might feel inclined to hasten their work and, in due course, make a catastrophic slip, giving Time whatever final advantage it needs; others, that the project has drawn on overly long, and must at last come to an end, whatever the feelings of the captain.

Either way, Silver can't quite shake a sense of impending crisis. He considers other possible milestones. The ship has already made over a thousand temporal incursions without notable incident—base ten, of course, which Silver has no reason to suspect that Time values more or less than any other number. From what Silver can glean of the logs, the crew's activities have probably eliminated just under one sixth of all living species in their region of space. Grievous unintended consequences that the crew euphemize as "counter indications" have occurred five times: three pandemics, one multi-million year-old evolutionary redirection, and the elimination of one (non-life-sustaining) planet. He wonders if another counter indication—unrecorded because unobserved—occurred that erased all non-element Elements from existence.

Even the alterations that the crew do not regard as "damage" have built up an enormous cumulative impact that Silver prefers to qualify, rather than describe with exact numbers. Most results of the incursions tread over the same ground again and again, altering and re-altering the balance of power between the hundred-odd civilizations in the region. Nonetheless, the layers and folds of rewritten history have piled up somewhere, for nothing that the time-ship's weapon has directly fired on ever returns, even when the rippled effects cancel one another out. ( _And_ , Silver thinks, _Elements keep going missing._ ) Someone who could get _into_ Time—safely and intact—might manage to find that stash of pieces and . . . do something with them.

 _Lead?_ Silver tries.

 _Hello, Silver!_ the jovial Element answers. _What's up?_

_Any chance you're available to look for 1,363 erasures within Time?_

_You don't ask for much, do you? Any reason you're not taking it to Them?_

_I don't think They have the proper perspective on this matter._

Silver can feel Lead's deep booming laugh at that, and it doesn't sound entirely amused. _Isn't that the story of the past century!_ Silver wonders what he's missed in the present timeline. _Give me a day or two, and then I'll see what I can do._

Two days later, when Lead has finished his assignment, he contacts Silver again, who tells him what to probably look for and a complete list from the ship's logs of everything the crew has erased. They wish one another good luck and Lead takes his leave.

Silver spends the rest of the year waiting for an update from Lead and damaging everything he can in the ship. He manages to stay just ahead of the repair crews, thus keeping the weapon offline and—hopefully—himself and Lead in the same timeline. Instead of a report from his colleague, however, the close of Silver's ninth year on this assignment brings a truly alarming discovery.

Just the previous week, Silver had taken an overlarge and excessively specialized tool left behind by a repair team, and physically smashed parts of the propulsion system in the hope that actually destroying pieces of the ship would slow down the Krenim engineers. (He doesn't dare directly assault the temporal core: he expects Time would just gobble him up and—if he gets very, very lucky—spit him back out in whatever useless, power-forsaken location it's put all the other missing Elements.) Passing the same way several days later, he catches a glimpse of shattered debris drifting back into place, apparently of its own volition. Startled, he stops to watch more closely and arrives at the conclusion that the shards retrace in reverse the trajectories they had taken when Silver initially battered them off: Time itself has stepped in to repair the ship by rewinding Silver's act of sabotage.

Silver decides he'll do best to let this angle go and return to attempting to foment mutiny, particularly given the lack of any report from Lead. He does try to contact his colleague, to let him know that their timelines will probably diverge, but he can't find him. He hopes this means that Lead has worked his way to somewhere deep and important inside Time, and not that he's gotten shunted to somewhere utterly useless, or obliterated altogether.

* * *

  
Year 10

_I'm no authority on time travel. In fact, I've made it my goal in life to avoid it._

  


The regular Krenim military, it turns out, use weapons that also affect time, though on nowhere near the level of the time-ship. Silver discovers this when the crew of one foreign ship—far, far from their own home—endeavouring to protect themselves from artillery unlike anything they have ever seen, try to adjust their shields to accommodate this unprecedented threat, and wind up insulating their vessel from the waves of causality effected by the time-ship's erasures as well. As this development drastically alters the impact of an incursion, the time-ship captain takes the discovery very poorly indeed. He launches an immediate investigation, acquires two of the alien crew and a sample of their ship, and, having failed to erase the vessel itself, scurries off again.

From what Silver gleans, the time-ship hypothetically could destroy the alien vessel, but the alien vessel can run quicker, which looks enough like the break he's hoped for. He sticks around long enough to sound out the two captives himself, pass along his observations for a possible mutiny to the one who seems most receptive to them ("You've been here how many years again? Why didn't you do it?" "I don't altogether _exist_ from these people's perspective. _You_ certainly _do_."), and, after examining the man's communication device, he works out how to find their ship and get himself there ("No, I can't take you too. It wouldn't work very well on your sort."). He goes.

And finally, Silver has gotten away from the time-ship and, he fancies, out from under the direct gaze of Time itself. As long as this _Voyager_ continues to function, he'll stay perfectly in step with the time-ship while also having more room to operate. There, however, lies the catch. _Voyager_ has already spent three months getting battered back and forth across this sector of space and has dispersed the majority of its crew, hoping for survival in separation. In the history of all intelligent life, people have surely hatched worse plans than this, but it does leave a badly damaged ship—intended to carry and receive service from a crew of two hundred—deeply understaffed with only seven individuals.

The skeleton crew works well for Silver, now that he's made a decision to let himself exist for people a little more concretely than he has for the past 9.4 years. He keeps a low profile while trying to decide which of them he ought to approach—he _really_ doesn't want to get this wrong, and all of them (himself included, Silver reflects) have operated at or near a state of crisis for far too long. Initially, he inclines towards the one called Seven, perhaps partially because her physiology comprises machine as well as flesh, but more because he likes what he has gathered of her thought processes. She assesses problems and sorts them into a hierarchy according to which need solutions most desperately and what skills the remaining crew have the ability to bring. He appreciates— _understands_ —regarding one's colleagues as so many different tools, many hands and minds all working to the same end. He doesn't often find that sort of thinking outside of his fellow Elements.

Unfortunately, Seven seems to have taken on herself the duty of attending a colleague who recently lost his sight. On the one hand, Tuvok _also_ has a very orderly way of processing the world, on the other, his works in a way that reminds Silver of Steel in a not-receptive-to-Silver's-suggestions mood. And while Silver knows Steel well enough to occasionally work around unreceptiveness from him (which, he reminds himself, he has managed to do because Steel exists solely in his imagination), he doesn't know Tuvok nearly so well to have any certainty that he could pull it off with him.

In the end, Silver approaches the captain. She has, after all, the position of ultimate authority, as well as a truly ferocious determination to retrieve her abducted crewmen. After a fashion, Janeway mirrors the time-ship captain—or, perhaps, the time-ship captain, less some two-hundred years—but as long as she won't give Time any footing to work with, Silver will gladly encourage her for what he condemns in the other. Persuading her to throw everything her ship has against the time-ship only hits even a slight hitch when Silver suggests that _everything_ should include the ship itself, at least as a last resort; by the end of the conversation, though, Silver almost feels as if she has convinced _him_ to throw everything he has into the fight and damn the consequences.

They do, however, exhaustively debate the possible effects of destroying the time-ship based on Silver's extensive experience with Time, a lot of gut intuition he passes off as experience (because Time doesn't have set _Rules_ , and intuition usually makes a far better guide than previous experience anyway), and an alarming amount of academic knowledge and personal experience on Janeway's part, particularly given her claims of attempting to steer clear of temporal entanglements. Then again, given how familiar the term "Starfleet" sounds to Silver, maybe he shouldn't feel so surprised.

"What about parallel timelines?" Janeway asks when Silver points out that temporal incursions in the past three months will have separated her from her dispersed crew, whose escape pods lack _Voyager_ 's temporal shielding. "Would it be possible to, say, step sideways to meet up with them again?"

"I very much doubt it," Silver says. "Given the technique of erasure, multiple possible timelines oughtn't coexist simultaneously."

"But, whether they survive the original conditions or the altered ones, they would still be there."

"Well, certainly you could find any that exist in this timeline, and they would have come _from_ you. But they would not be the same as those you sent out." After a brief pause, he amends, "Or possibly the other way around."

Janeway runs a hand through her hair. "And that sometimes makes the difference."

Silver considers this. "It might, at that." It at least had not notably affected Lead, but Elements might differ from other entities in this.

When they pick up a few local allies, the captain, ever conscious of her crew, sends her remaining officers to the ships of their new friends. Buried in _Voyager_ 's engines, Silver doesn't even witness the final battle, but following the captain's communications with her scattered crew, he knows that the big boom he had contemplated over nine years ago will finally get its day, and that he'll see it happen from the inside. The captain offers him some final words of warning.

"If you want to join one of those other ships, Silver, this is your last chance."

He doesn't precisely have an obliteration wish, much less a death wish (he doesn't even altogether believe in the latter possibility with respect to himself), nor yet any notion that he ought to receive some punishment for his years' worth of failure. He just knows—call it intuition—that the explosion will send him someplace he needs to go.

"Thanks, but I'll stay right here."

"Don't take this the wrong way," Janeway says, "but I hope we never meet."

Silver has no reply but to laugh at that.

* * *

  
200 Years Ago

_Only Time can pronounce judgement against me._

  


A home in the Krenim colony on Kyana Prime. A man—a genius in the field of temporal mechanics—sits at a desk, studying his calculations until his wife arrives and entreats him to take breakfast and spend the beautiful day with her. He acquiesces. Across the room, four figures watch the couple depart, unobserved by them.

"Well, that went rather well, I think," one of the men says.

Another man, the shortest of the group, snorts in response. "You consider that 'going well'?"

"We did _win_ , Steel," the first replies, with a very self-satisfied smirk; the woman, who wears a very pretty blue dress, walks to the desk.

"It took you ten years," the second man points out.

"Did it?" The first cocks his head, puzzled. Trying to catch at a memory.

"It took all of us two hundred years," the third man says.

The first snaps his fingers. "Now _that_ I remember. So tell me, Steel," he says, draping an arm over his colleague's shoulders, "how many of those years were _you_ on the the job?"

The woman answers for him. "Sixteen." She's collected several of the physicist's notes. "Silver? Lead? Perhaps you can think of some way to keep these safe?"

The first man reaches out slowly, but the third steps in ahead of him and takes them from the woman. "I know just the thing."

"Then I believe we're done here."

**Author's Note:**

> The _Voyager_ episode featured is the two-parter "Year of Hell". I was unable to resist a number of tremendously appropriate quotes on the subject of Time—most notably, the one that serves as the story summary and inspired the whole concept for the fic in the first place. It and most of the rest come from none other than Captain Annorax of the time-ship; the two exceptions are the ones used for Year 1 (from his subordinate Obrist) and Year 10 (from Captain Janeway).


End file.
